“Mm.” Sasuke stared at the palm of his own hand and thought for a minute. There probably was a hint he could give them, a trick to the whole process. But he only understood it intuitively. He struggled to teach it. “The way to adjust is…” He leaned forward. “Establish your target…and throw it like this.” Even he knew that this told them absolutely nothing.
As the children sighed in perfect unison, Sasuke smiled wryly at himself. I’m not suited to teaching.
Kakashi had been great with words. While Sasuke simply acted on instinct that defied explanation, Kakashi communicated all of his knowledge and experience to the next generation in an easy-to-understand manner.
I’ve got a long way to go as a master, Sasuke thought.
In the end, Boruto wasn’t able to get doubles with the dice, despite practicing until the sun went down. He had annihilated the powerful Momoshiki with his Rasengan, and yet he couldn’t make a single sugar cube roll the way he wanted. It was humiliating.
Even after he got home, all he could think of was the dice training. Sitting in the bath, he remembered the day’s practice and spread out his hands beneath the water. The droplets falling from the wet ceiling broke the surface above his palms. Just a tiny drop could cause a ripple in the water’s surface. Maybe it wasn’t impossible to hit the sugar cube with chakra without crushing it.
I can’t get pysched out now! Boruto shook his head, reprimanding himself. I only just started practicing. Too early to get bummed out! I’m Old Man Sasuke’s student, after all!
He held his wet hands in front of his eyes. “Gentle enough not to break the sugar cubes…” He’d only intended to do some visualization training, but he carelessly kneaded his chakra for real, and the water in the tub began to swirl into a vortex.
“Boruto?” His mother, Hinata, popped her head in immediately. “You can’t go kneading chakra there. You’ll break the tub.”
“D-don’t peep in the bath! Mom, you gotta stop using the Byakugan in the house!”
She giggled. “I didn’t mean to. I just felt the presence of chakra.”
By the time he got out of the bath, Himawari was watching a music show in the living room. On the screen, Himeno Lily was singing and dancing beneath colorful spotlights. Drops of sweat were flying off her.
“Have a marshmallooow ♪ C’mon c’mon ♪”
Himawari hummed along with Lily, her eyes glued to the screen.
“Himawari, you like Himeno Lily?” Boruto asked.
“Yeah!” Himawari nodded. “She’s so cute. And she’s a really good singer and dancer.”
Is she? Boruto turned back to the screen, which was filled with a close-up on Lily’s face. He didn’t really get how she was cute, but he did think her eyes were a pretty color. Her deep-purple irises were bright and clear, almost like the color at the end of the rainbow.
Go! Go! ♪ Go tooo ♪ Hell and angel ♪
Go! Go! ♪ Go tooo ♪ Violet moon ♪
Hearing them again now, he had to admit Sarada was right—the lyrics were weird.
The training with the dice continued the following day.
“Aaaaah!!” Sarada’s pained cry echoed through the forest. The faces of the dice beside the shuriken plunged into the tree stump read three and four. “Almost doubles! I was so close…” She slumped to her knees.
“Heh heh! I’m totally gonna be the first to make it happen!” Boruto started boasting, lost in the moment. Then, “Ah!” His eyes widened in despair. He’d pushed too hard with the flow of chakra and split both of his dice in two.
“Maybe I’m closest to being the first one to do it,” Mitsuki said with a laugh as he wove his signs to activate his Wind Style.
After watching his students desperately try anything and everything for a while, Sasuke called out to them, “Today, I’m adding something extra to the training schedule.”
“Huh?” Boruto raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“Lorentz Gun.”
What?
Both eyebrows now raised, he followed Sasuke as he led them to the top of a cliff. The front of the rock face he’d seen in the distance yesterday had been carved away by Sasuke’s kunai and the ensuing a landslide.
“This technique is an application of Lightning Style.”
Sasuke pulled out a brown kunai like the one he’d used before as his students bobbed their heads up and down.
“Hey, Dad?” Sarada asked. “Why’s that kunai kinda red?”
“It’s copper. It conducts electricity well.” Sasuke readied the weapon in his hand. “With the traditional Lightning Style attack, you hit your opponent with a powerful voltage to cause damage. Boruto, your Purple Lightning is like that. But this technique is fundamentally different. It makes use of the fact that powerful electrical currents generate magnetic fields, a principle the scientific ninja team discovered recently. They’re calling it electromagnetic induction.”
Boruto scoffed at the words “scientific ninja team.”
Sasuke turned toward the rock face in the distance and stretched out one of arm, balancing the kunai on his middle finger.
“Position the weapon in the direction of your target and set two bolts of electricity on either side.” Electricity crackled upward from his palm. “Throw the copper kunai so that it passes between the two currents.” He tossed the kunai.
Boom!
The instant the bolts on either side touched it, the kunai shot forward, fast enough that it shattered the sound barrier with a thunderous boom. It mowed down the trees of the forest and crashed into the rock face.
This technique generated a force that was on a different level from anything a bare hand could manage. Boruto doubted that the Hokage himself could throw a kunai faster.
Sasuke turned back to his stunned students. “First, try splitting the basic Lightning Style attack into two bolts of current. You want to generate a current in each hand at the same time.”
“Okay!” Sarada and Mitsuki shouted in perfect unison.
Only Boruto stayed silent, looking glum as he glanced at the dust cloud that had enveloped the rock face.
Sasuke was not blind to Boruto’s reaction, but he continued the lesson, pulling copper kunai out of his bag for each of his students. “Copper kunai are prone to rusting, so polish them regularly with vinegar. They’re not as powerful when they’re rusty.”
“This is very interesting,” Mitsuki said as he accepted the kunai. “A normal steel kunai is first heated in fire and then coated with a blackening film to protect it from rust. And yet a copper kunai is the opposite—you polish it in vinegar so that it doesn’t rust.”
“You know your stuff.” Sasuke looked at Mitsuki, impressed.
“Master Konohamaru taught us about it.”
“I knew that, too!” Sarada immediately staked her claim.
Rather than chiming in himself, Boruto stared at a bird in the sky.
“What’s wrong?” Sasuke asked when Boruto didn’t move to take the kunai from him.
“Oh, I’m gonna go practice moving the dice some more,” he replied dully, and returned to the forest.
Before he knew it, the western sky had taken on a faint red hue, and he hadn’t managed to roll doubles even once.
I’m definitely gonna make it happen this time! Boruto held the dice in his hands as he kneaded his chakra.
The dice turned twice and then stopped, a three on each face.
I did it!
The thrill of victory was fleeting. A breath later, the die on the right slowly tumbled one more time to display a one.
“Gaaah! Come on!” Boruto kicked his legs out and flopped back. He’d been so close, which made it all the more vexing. “Aaah! Dammit!!”
I guess Sarada and Mitsuki are practicing that Lightning Style technique right about now. That electromagnetic whatever-it-is.
Boruto leaped to his feet, grabbed the dice, and flung them away, annoyed.
“Don’t get so worked up.”
The voice came from above his head. When he lifted his face, he saw Sasuke looking down on him.
“I wasn’t… It’s not like that.” Knowing how dejected he sounded, Boruto quickly averted his eyes upward. A crow glided through the air above them.
Sasuke sat down on a stump. Instead of looking at Boruto, he also directed his gaze up toward the sky. “Boruto. You hate science?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Just a hunch.”
Dyed orange, the sky seemed almost on fire, and the wind coming at them was brisk. Even so, it was a peaceful sunset. The grass swayed in the breeze, and their long shadows rippled in slight waves.
“It’s not that I hate it. It’s just…” Boruto began to speak slowly, feeling guilty somehow. “It’s just like…all that stuff about making it last with blackening, and the Lorentz Gun and all that… Relying on science, it’s so un-ninja-like. I mean, it’s not very…cool.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Yeah… I don’t actually like science.”
Rolling clouds blocked the setting sun, casting shadows on Boruto and Sasuke until the gentle breeze slowly pushed them away.
“If you know science, you can use ninjutsu even more effectively.” Sasuke watched a bird returning to its nest as he spoke. “Science and ninjutsu aren’t in opposition. They grow from the same roots.”
Boruto lowered his eyes and glared at the ground. “I know.” He was thinking about a bitter memory from his chunin exams when he’d secretly used a forbidden scientific ninja tool and was disqualified after being discovered by none other than his own father. In his head, he knew science was definitely not a bad thing, just like Sasuke said. But his irrational heart rejected the whole idea out of hand. Just hearing “science” brought back his guilt over the exams.